If it wasn’t for the sign, it would look like any other house from the street; a small, one story red house with white trim …perhaps charmingly reminiscent of a log cabin or summer cottage, but a regular home nonetheless. Driving along an obscure residential street in Rockport, Massachusetts, you might pass right by it. But it would be a shame if you missed that sign, the one that says it all: “Paper House.”

The Paper House

In 1922, a mechanical engineer, Elis Stenman, began building a small summer home. It started out like any other home, with a timber frame, roof and floors, but Stenman had other plans for the walls: newspaper. 215 sheets of newspaper (about an inch thick) varnished together into walls, to be exact.

Paper walls were an economically brilliant idea, not that Stenman needed the money, having designed the machines that make paper clips. Newspapers may be cheap, but they also make great insulators. While no one is quite sure what Stenman’s motivation was, be it thrifty, logical, or merely curious, it is clear that he was utterly devoted to the idea. Layer after layer after layer of newspaper, varnish, and a homemade glue of flour, water and apple peels were pasted together until more than 100,000 newspapers walled the home. Stenman had originally intended to put up clapboards on the outside, but decided to leave the newspaper, just to see what happened. The result is still standing, still insulating, and “pretty waterproof,” according to the Paper House website.

Word got around in the ’20s when Stenman was building his house of paper, so the strange home has had curious visitors since its beginning. The house wasn’t turned into a museum until 1942, after Stenman’s death, after he had filled the interior with paper furniture. Everything inside the paper house is also made of paper, from the curtains to the chairs to the clock, save for two objects; a fireplace and a piano. Those are real, thoughtfully covered in paper. The fireplace is functional, though it is hard to imagine a fire on a cold night not ending in certain disaster in a house made of paper and varnish.

Perhaps the most wonderful part of the paper house is the paper itself. After nearly 100 years of exposure to the elements, the topmost layers of the walls are slowly peeling back, revealing bits of newspaper articles from the 1920s. Wanted ads (see photo above), recipes, news from Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign, and headlines like “LINDBERGH HOPS OFF FOR OCEAN FLIGHT TO PARIS” can be discovered by inquisitive visitors. The walls are a timecapsule, one that can only be viewed and enjoyed in tiny, random bits. As time goes on, more of of the walls will peel away, offering an ever-changing glimpse into the past.

Layers of newspaper and varnish

(This post also appeared in the lovely Antler Magazine, an art, fashion, design, literature and culture magazine.)